New French President Francois Hollande has had a busy week: After being sworn into office Tuesday, he hopped on a plane to Germany to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. That plane, however, was struck by lightning on the way to Berlin, and he had to turn around and board a new flight. But the Socialist leader has jumped into the real storm: the Eurozone crisis. Tomorrow Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Merkel will chat via videoconference before heading to the G-8 summit on Friday, with the NATO summit beginning in Chicago on Saturday.

A preview of that first meeting of the four European leaders by The Independent:

David Cameron will claim today that austerity is working despite Britain's slide back into recession as he urges eurozone countries to either "make up or break up".

The Prime Minister will warn that Britons are "living in perilous economic times," having heard the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, say yesterday that the eurozone is "tearing itself apart". But Mr Cameron will rule out any departure from his Government's tough deficit-reduction strategy. He will also reject the "something for nothing" economics of the Labour opposition, which will be seen as a criticism of François Hollande, the new Socialist President France elected on a "pro-growth" ticket.

Mr Cameron is expected to hold his first face-to-face meeting with Mr Hollande tomorrow, when both men will be in the United States for a summit of leaders from the G8 major economies. The Prime Minister is likely to side with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, in a debate over the right balance between austerity and growth. There could also be tension between Britain and France over Mr Hollande's plans to bring back French troops from Afghanistan from next year. The withdrawal strategy will be discussed at a Nato summit to be attended by Mr Cameron in Chicago on Sunday.

Restating his economic case today Mr Cameron will insist: "Now is the time to stand firm. We are moving in the right direction - not rushing the task, but judging it carefully. And that is why we must resist voices calling on us to retreat."

(Photo by Antoine Antoniol/Getty Images)

A day after Sudan declared a state of emergency along its border with recently independent South Sudan, the south said that Khartoum bombed an oil region in another disturbing sign of the escalation of hostilities. From Reuters:

Weeks of border fighting have raised fears Sudan and South Sudan could return to all-out war, after failing to resolve a string of disputes over oil revenues and border demarcation.

Philip Aguer, spokesman for South Sudan's army, the SPLA, said Sudanese forces had bombed Panakuach in Unity State.

"There was bombing in Panakuach yesterday. Not less than four bombs were dropped," Aguer said, adding there had been no reports of casualties.

There was no immediate comment from the Sudanese army.

South Sudan has accused Sudan of using its warplanes to bomb its territories. Khartoum has denied it, though it has said it reserves the right to use air strikes in self-defense.

Unity State has come under repeated bombardment over the past week, and an air strike in its capital Bentiu last Monday killed two people.

The UN is debating what to do about the tensions, but to me whatever they do the writing is on the wall: Sudan didn't want South Sudan to gain its independence, and will stoke whatever discord it needs to over still-disputed regions and oil revenues in response.

(Photo by Kazuhiro Ibuki - Pool/Getty Images)

After shooting to Internet superstardom and greater global recognition, the hunt for Lord's Resistance Army rebel leader Joseph Kony continues as before, but at a more publicized pace. International forces, including a hundred U.S. special ops troops, are aiding in the Central African hunt for Kony, wanted for kidnapping children to use as soldiers and other war crimes, and his band of some 300 fighters. An interesting story in The New York Times about being on the trail of one of the world's most wanted men:

Their biggest challenge, they say, is Mr. Kony's turf, a vast expanse the size of California in the middle of Africa that is so rugged it renders much of the American gadgetry useless. Picture towering trees that blot out the sun, endless miles of elephant grass, and swirling brown rivers that coil like intestines and are infested with crocodiles; one of them recently ate a Ugandan member of the force.

"This is not going to be an easy slog," said Ken Wright, a Navy SEAL captain and the commander of the joint American detachment assisting in the Kony hunt.

Still, in the past several months since they arrived, the Americans say Mr. Kony's army of around 300 fighters is showing cracks. No longer is Mr. Kony able to direct the massacres he directed just a few years ago when his fighters waylaid entire towns and hacked hundreds of people to death. His armed acolytes are breaking up into small, desperate groups, American officials say, and for the first time they are abandoning many of the women and children they had abducted who cannot keep up as they flee deeper into the bush.

...The Central African Republic would be an excellent place to disappear. Its national army is one of the region's smallest and weakest. Its terrain is primordially thick. And its infrastructure is shambolic.

Because there are so few roads and telephones, it often takes weeks for news of an attack to reach the fusion center. By the time the Green Berets sift the information and help dispatch the Ugandan hunting squads, Mr. Kony is gone. The Americans say they never go on patrols themselves.

MORE: Behind the headlines in Africa

Encrypted al-Qaeda documents embedded inside a porn flick have revealed that the terror organization planned to attack cruise ships and carrying out Mumbai-style attacks in Europe. German newspaper Die Zeit first reported on the trove found on a suspected al-Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year. Here, details are shared with CNN.

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" -- and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence -- more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

Future plots include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008. Ten gunmen killed 164 people in that three-day rampage.

Terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic were among the documents, too, according to intelligence sources.

Porn doesn't exactly fit the moral superiority claimed in al-Qaeda's famous 1998 fatwa on the West. The plan for the cruise ship reportedly would include dressing passengers in orange jump suits, as if they were al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and then videotaping their execution. Investigators believe that Lodin and a partner were sent to Europe to recruit more al-Qaeda members after training in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

MORE: Behind al-Qaeda